the real purpose of this software it to find prime numbers of the marsenne type. It has been proven that there are an infinite number of marsenne prime numbers and yet only 31 have been found. A if 2^P-1 is prime, it is called marsenne. The numbers that are being found from time to time are of about 10 million digits and so finding them will max out the CPU, it will also take something like 10 days on a P4 2.4c.If you do find a marsenne prime you will get 50,000$ in cash (no joke!) but the odds are something like 160,000:1 so good luck!The guys here use this program to check if an overclocked CPU can stand being maxed out for several hours.

I had a much better usertitle but was caught trying to hack me a better one so I got my current title as a punishment

Prime 95 is a good program, but i don't use it when overclocking. I'm running an Asus P4C800, 512mb Corsair Dual PC3200, P4 2.6C(overclocked to 3.2 GHZ), when i overclock it, it fails the stress test after a few minutes, but it has never locked up during a game and it runs fine in things like autocad and other porgrams of that nature. So, it is usefule to some extent, but just becuase it fails that test, doesn't mean your computer will crash or freeze up all the time.